Neues Buch

Mit dem Literaturnobelpreis-Träger Le Clézio wurde ich gestern Abend fertig und das Buch hat mir sehr gut gefallen. Es soll eigentlich gar nicht sein bestes Buch sein, aber ich mochte es und werde mir sicher auch einige andere Bücher dieses Autors kaufen. Leider ist das zweite, das Jokers angeboten hat, schon ausverkauft.

Heute beginne ich jedenfalls dann dieses Buch:

Iris MURDOCH:
The Bell

Review: An Anglican lay community on an estate attached to a convent of Anglican nuns provides the setting for some quite melodramatic happenings - suicide, a wrecked marriage, an antiquarian cause celebre - among the small and eccentric band of idealists. Not since the early Huxley novels have such a varied, neurotic and strange group of characters enacted their amorous and philosophical adventures against the mellow background of a stately English home. The community's director, a devout and intelligent young man, keeps trying to convince himself that his lapses into homosexuality are not really sufficient moral cause to prevent his becoming a priest. The very beautiful girl whose Ambitions to enter the convent make her the pride of the community turns out to be a schizophrenic in love with the director (who had seduced her brother). The naive college boy eager to partake of the good and pure life seduces a visitor's willing wife, takes part in a hoax concerning the convent's new bell that ruins the community and becomes involved with the director in a fashion that forever demolishes his hope of being a priest. Naturally these and other less sensational but very amusing characters and the hothouse atmosphere of a whacky English Brooks Farm provide ample opportunity for satire. But it is Miss Murdoch's special gift that makes her people real and sympathetic as well as bulls-eye targets for a most Jively wit. By now Iris Murdoch's novels should have won her a select and appreciative following in this country, and "The Bell" can only add to her growing stature. However, after the brilliantly surrealistic invention of The Flight From The Enchanter one feels in this book as in the previous novel, where fantasy was abandoned for more realistic plot and treatment, that something is missing, that the author could have done even more with her talents. Nevertheless she is certainly one of the few young novelists to watch. (Kirkus Reviews)